The transport of articles from one location to another geographically separated location is typically conducted by vehicles, railroad, and aircraft. Within metropolitan areas of substantial size, the transport of articles is more often conducted by vehicles such as cars, trucks, scooters, motorcycles, and bicycles. More specifically, the transport of articles for same-day on-demand collection (i.e., pick-up) and delivery within large cities requires a variety of mobile units in communication with a central processing or control facility.
Known transportation providers (e.g., FedEx and UPS) handling local deliveries, non-local deliveries, scheduled deliveries, and routed deliveries rely primarily upon vehicles to deliver articles within metropolitan areas. Most of these transportation providers, however, do not serve customers seeking same-day on-demand delivery. Stated differently, the traditional large transportation providers cater to the overnight and routine scheduled deliveries. Thus, there is a need for a system for controlling the transport of articles that serves customers requiring same-day on-demand services. Stated differently, there is a need for a system for controlling the collection and delivery of articles on the same day as the order is requested.
Traditional courier companies gain a slight competitive advantage based upon economies of scale. Servicing large clients, however, necessitates competition for tenders and subsequent discounts to the contracted firms. Further, an upper limit on the number of couriers and customers still exists that even the largest companies cannot support due to the reliance on human controllers to allocate incoming jobs to suitable couriers. The present invention permits a user to multiply the economies of scale associated with larger courier companies while attracting and servicing clients falling across the size spectrum, including personal users who will be able to pay for individual deliveries by credit card without the need for an established account.
Known courier systems may consider predetermined or historical routes (e.g., shortest distance between two points) when allocating jobs, but fail to consider variables that may expedite or delay the execution (i.e., completion) of an order. Thus, there is a need for a control system that compares historical travel times with actual travel times and updates the travel times to more accurately predict the expected collection and delivery of articles.
Advantageously, the present invention incorporates heuristic techniques in the selection and control of couriers. It will be understood by those skilled in the art that the term “heuristic” used in connection with “techniques” refers to methods that serve as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods. Stated differently, heuristic techniques relates to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-education (e.g., the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance. Heuristic techniques are also commonly associated with adaptive learning.
Further, the term “metaheuristics” refers to tools that allow computers to choose the most appropriate candidate from a variety of options in real-time. It will also be understood that metaheuristics refers to a high-level algorithmic framework or approach that can be specialized to solve optimization problems in the search for feasible solutions. In other words, metaheuristics are a class of approximate methods designed to solve difficult combinatorial optimization problems where classical heuristics have failed to be efficient and effective. In brief, those skilled in the art will understand that the terms heuristics and metaheuristics refers to methodological approaches used to address combinatorial optimization formulations. Specifically, the present invention provides a server having a metaheuristic computer program.
As compared to known courier systems reliant upon human controllers, a more desirable option is to provide a system for controlling the transport of articles having a server in communication with a plurality of mobile communication devices in the possession of couriers. Even more desirable is a system wherein the server is capable of identifying the most suitable courier, transmitting order information, analyzing historical route data and updating route information to thereby minimize delivery time and more accurately predict the collection and delivery times of articles.